A LOST ART ART AND WRITING BY PHILIPPE WILLIS
ANCIENT, NATURAL One has to imagine our ancient ancestors watched the natural world to figure out how to do everything. How to hunt, how to trap, what to eat for food, what to eat for medicine. Did spiders’ webs inspire the first trappers to make nets and snares out of sinew and fiber to catch birds and rabbits? Did pitcher plants inspire the dug-up, leaf covered pitfalls used to catch boar and deer? Did clams or Venus flytraps inspire the jawed footholds of the 1600’s - 1900’s? Coming into hunting in my 30’s, there has ben an inescapable archetypally masculine quality to it. A manhood rite of passage. There’s a spirit of the wild that connects one to our predatory mammalian brethren, the gnashing teeth and claws of canines, bears, lions and mustelids. When it comes to trapping, however, I’ve noticed something subtle that feels, to me, absolutely primordial and archetypally feminine in nature. Something much further back, closer to the beginning.
Podcast 116
